Investing in bare-bones sound
LiU Invest joins Rove Technologies AB as a co-founder. The company is based on technology developed at LiU, a previous licensing deal and the results from a so-called Summer Match.
There are an incredible number of outstanding research ideas that have the potential to be commercialized and put to good use, but this requires time, energy and resources.
"The summer match's market research was decisive for us finally starting Rove Technologies," says Stefan Stenfelt, co-owner and idea carrier of the LEAD company Rove Technologies.
In 2019, he participated with his idea in the Summer Match when he himself did not have the opportunity to investigate the conditions for creating a company around his research, and for this he is incredibly grateful today. It was there that he met Emelina Mujkanovic who has now joined Rove Technologies as CEO.
Stefan had researched a model of a human head that can simulate and see exactly how sound is picked up through the skull bone. The model measures vibrations in the bone of the skull, so-called Bone Conduction, which is used, for example, to test hearing aids for people who cannot hear through the normal ear canal. Stefan's model can help develop new products or be applied to increase the sound quality of existing products.
"It started with Facebook Research Labs being interested in my research and wanting to buy license rights. I then received help from LiU Invest to solve this and thus the basic idea itself was noticed. The idea was then to test whether there was an interest in this solution among more companies, and that's where the Summer Match came in," says Stefan.
The summer match is an entrepreneurial program at LEAD that focuses on helping to develop ideas born from research at Linköping University towards market-adapted products and services. For five weeks, carefully selected students from LiU work with the research ideas, with the support of LEAD's experienced business coaches, to give them new opportunities through, for example, market analysis, mapping or prototype work.
"What I did during the Summer Match was to locate interesting markets for the simulation solution, carry out analyzes of how the product can be applied and then contact the companies and book customer meetings," says Emelina Mujkanovic, one of the students who worked on the research idea in the Summer Match and who today is CEO of the company.